Portable electronic devices such as tablet computers, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDA's), portable media players and the like, often have relatively small displays screens to make them more portable. This limits the number and size of graphical display elements that can be displayed at any one time on the display screen. As a consequence, user interfaces must be simplified.
Consider, for instance, a user interface for the selection of videos for display from a collection of videos. One approach is to display representative frames, or “thumbnails,” of available videos and then select a video of the available videos in response to a user's touch on a displayed thumbnail. However, this action causes the video to be played from the start and does not allow selection of a portion of the video, such as a favorite scene. To access a desired scene, a user must then interact with a displayed scroll bar or a scrubber bar to search through the video. This approach may be very inefficient for longer videos.
In video editing on a larger screen, a single video may be split in multiple segments and thumbnails from each segment displayed in one or more rows, together with scroll bars to enable selection of a segment for editing. However, on a small screen, the scroll bars may be too small for easy manipulation, or, if enlarged, leave little screen space for additional information to be displayed. This problem is exacerbated when the graphical user interface is displayed on a touch-sensitive screen and is controlled by a touch of a user's fingertip rather than by a computer mouse.
It would be useful to provide a way to easily select a segment of video or other media from a plurality of media files displayed for selection on a display screen of an electronic device.